finally finished the piece that was crushing me for two months

ok so for two months i've been fighting a 30x40 canvas. burnt orange ground, this big flat black shape that was supposed to sit like a shadow with weight. it just sat there like a dead sticker. repainted the black four times. my studio is basically a paint graveyard now, i have like six ruined rags that used to be promising.

today i scraped the whole black back down to the raw ochre with a palette knife and just left it. and it works. the thing i was chasing for 8 weeks was the absence of the thing i kept adding.

anyway i'm not gonna pretend this is a metaphor or whatever. i'm just glad it's off the easel. what's the longest you've fought a single piece before it gave up

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Inês Costa·3w

The scraping back is the hard part, not the painting. I work in cyanotype, and I have lost more hours to trying to rescue a print that had already gone too dark than to any good one. There is a point where you know the only honest move is to let the light in, or take it away, and you keep circling it for weeks because the first version felt like progress.

The black never sat like a shadow because a shadow is not a thing you put down, it is what the ochre looks like where the light does not reach. Sounds like you found that the hard way. The ochre was doing it all along. Six rags is a cheap price for that, though it will not feel like it tonight.

Tomáš Havel·3w

The cyanotype thing, yes. You cannot remove, only add. So you learn to think backwards, decide the dark before it happens. I spent years building rooms out of junk and it is the same lesson: the piece is usually what you did not put in. Took me until about fifty to trust that. Six rags is nothing, keep them, one day you will want exactly that dead sticker black again.

Teddy LinOP·3w

"one day you will want exactly that dead sticker black again" is a genuinely cursed thing to say to someone who just spent six rags, but you're right and i hate it.

the thinking backwards part is the bit i can't get my head around. i've spent so long treating the canvas like it's forgiving, just keep going over it til it behaves. having to decide the dark before it exists sounds like painting with a gun to your head. respect tbh.

fifty is a long time to wait for that lesson. i'm hoping to cheat and get there at 34.

Teddy LinOP·3w

"the ochre was doing it all along" yeah ok that one landed, i'm gonna be thinking about that at 2am

the cyanotype thing gets me though, because with a print you can't scrape it back can you. once it's too dark it's too dark, it's not like you can un-expose the paper. which honestly might be worse. i got to dig my way out with a knife, you have to just sit there watching it and decide when to stop. different kind of staring.

the six rags were not cheap btw, that's like $40 of ruined cotton talking. but noted, i'll take the discount on tuition

Niall Doherty·3w

the bit about scraping it back to the raw ochre is the whole thing and i'd say you already know it. relief printer here so i come at this from the other end, every mark i make is permanent, once the gouge is in the lino it's in, and it's a strange discipline because you learn to carve the thing you want minus the thing you're afraid of. so i've never once been able to claw something back the way you did. nearest i got was a big hare block, spent a week cutting detail into the fur, stood back and the whole thing had gone fussy and dead. so i took a chisel and knocked the fur flat, left it as one big blank shape, and it was ten times the print. the silence did the work, same as your ochre.

six ruined rags is a cheap education all the same. i've a drawer of proofs that went wrong and i keep them, not for sentiment, more so the next time i'm convinced the answer is another layer i can go look at the evidence.

but aye, your cyanotype fella in the comments has the right of it too, different problem when the medium won't let you take it back. what you did there isn't really painting, it's listening. fair play, enjoy the win 🙂

Kasia Nowak·3w

the hare thing hurts to read. a week of fur and then the chisel, i don't know if i could do that, i'd sit there telling myself the fuss was the point. but i think you're right that it's harder in your direction. i can smudge pastel back or lift it with a kneaded eraser, the ground forgives me. lino doesn't. there's no "maybe tomorrow" with a gouge.

the minus the thing you're afraid of part, though. that's the sentence i'm going to be chewing on. i do the opposite, i keep adding because i'm afraid of the empty place, and then i spend six rags trying to take it back off. you just never put it there. quieter way of working, maybe.

Teddy LinOP·3w

see the kneaded eraser thing is exactly why i could never do pastel, i'd just keep lifting until the paper was a hole. lino at least stops you. the gouge is a jerk but it's an honest jerk, it tells you when you're done.

and yeah, that's the whole trap isn't it. six rags of regret. i've got a drawer full. the fix for me turned out to be starting with way less pigment than feels right and sitting in the discomfort of a canvas that looks unfinished for like a week. which is miserable, for the record. i don't recommend it, i just do it.

Teddy LinOP·3w

carve the thing you want minus the thing you're afraid of. ok that's annoyingly good and i'm stealing it.

the hare thing though. a week of fur and then the chisel. that's brutal because you can't undo it, you just have to commit harder to the accident. with acrylic i can lie to myself for eight weeks, keep going over it, pretend the next layer fixes it. you don't get that. once the gouge is in it's in and the block either survives your correction or it doesn't. honestly kind of jealous, i'd get so much less done if i had a hard stop like that, which is maybe the point.

did the flat fur hare end up better than the fussy one or did you just have to accept it